On Thursday, Joe Biden posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, to Sen. John McCain.
I don’t pretend to know Biden’s true motivation for doing this. Perhaps it was a way to appear bipartisan or to make amends with Meghan McCain. Despite endorsing him in 2020, she has been openly critical of him since his botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. Whatever his reasons, Biden used the ceremony to rewrite history, claiming he was the one who encouraged McCain to run for president and then ridiculously insisting that he never said anything bad about him in his life.
“We ran against each other, which I didn’t like, on tickets for the highest office in the land,” Biden claimed. “I was a candidate for vice president, he was the candidate for president. I never stopped admiring John. Never said a negative thing about him in my life because I knew his honor, his courage, and his commitment.”
This is, of course, completely false and easily proven so. In October 2008, Joe Biden denounced John McCain as “an angry man” and accused him of taking “the low road to the highest office in the land.”
That sure sounds negative to me.
When McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin, correctly acknowledged Barack Obama’s friendship with terrorist Bill Ayers, Biden said, “To have a vice presidential candidate raise the most outrageous inferences – the ones that John McCain’s campaign is condoning – is simply wrong.”
“Every single false charge and baseless accusation is an attempt to get you to stop paying attention to what’s going on in this country. Beyond the attacks, what is John McCain really offering?” Biden asked.
That sure sounds negative to me.
During the campaign, Biden also repeatedly mocked McCain over his family’s wealth, which he claimed made him unable to understand middle-class struggles. “That’s not a worry John McCain has to worry about,” Biden said. “It’s a pretty hard experience: He’ll have to figure out which of the seven kitchen tables to sit at.”
That sure sounds negative to me.
Biden stooped to another low when he accused McCain of not supporting our troops and wanting to cut their funding. “John McCain voted to cut off funding for the troops,” Biden claimed. “Let me say that again, John McCain voted against (it).” Biden also said McCain had “not been a maverick on virtually anything that genuinely affects the things that people really talk about around the kitchen table.”
That sure sounds negative to me.
Despite any political disagreement you might have with John McCain, his support of the United States military was never in doubt. Yet, Biden had no qualms about questioning McCain’s commitment to our troops or his national security record. Joe Biden even dared to claim, “Again and again, on the most important national security issues of our time, John McCain was wrong, and Barack Obama was proven right.”
That sure sounds negative to me.
Ironically, Obama’s former defense secretary, Robert Gates, once noted that Biden has “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” Never mind that Obama and Biden’s tenure in the White House was marked by a long string of foreign policy failures, including poor choices with Iraq and Afghanistan, the Benghazi attack, Syria, the quagmire in Libya, the rise of ISIS, and the Iran deal, among others, and this record of poor judgment continued upon his taking office, with his botched withdrawal from Afghanistan proving to be one of his most consequential actions.
Yet, in 2008, Biden said of McCain, “But America deserves more than a brave soldier. It deserves a wise leader, a leader who understands our problems.”
That sure sounds negative to me.
On top of all these negative attacks on McCain that Biden wants us to pretend never happened, Biden never stood up for McCain against some of the lowest attacks possible. When the Obama campaign accused McCain of racism, where was Joe? When Obama accused McCain of trying to scare voters by mentioning Obama’s “funny name” or that “he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills,” Joe Biden never came to his “friend’s” defense. He had no problem with his campaign accusing his “friend” of racism.
John McCain was far from my favorite Republican, but he was a better man than Barack Obama and Joe Biden combined. I am sure that, had he been elected in 2008, I wouldn’t have agreed with everything he would have done, but he would have been a far better president than either Obama or Biden.
And yet Biden had the gall to claim he never said anything negative about McCain. As far as I’m concerned, that audacious lie was Biden’s final insult.
